Over seven miles of railroad, a quarter-century in the making, now estimated at $94 million. NJ Transit's own CEO says 2031. Two county boards have passed resolutions. No agency has answered either one.
The bones of a great railroad still cut across Warren and Sussex counties, over fills, through a tunnel, across a viaduct 115 feet high. What that roadbed has not carried in 56 years is a regularly scheduled passenger train. On August 12, the Warren County Board of County Commissioners voted to ask the State of New Jersey to help change that.
The resolution asks the Governor's Office, U.S. Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker, U.S. Representative Tom Kean Jr., the New Jersey Department of Transportation, New Jersey Transit, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, the Federal Railroad Administration and Amtrak to put resources behind restoring service between Scranton, Pennsylvania, and New York City on a 136-mile corridor already in public ownership.
It cites Amtrak's expansion vision for the corridor and the Federal Railroad Administration's Corridor ID program, the federal route-development pipeline that has advanced the Scranton-to-New York corridor to its second planning step. A stop in Blairstown and three daily round trips, both drawn from the Amtrak plan, are in the resolution's words "subject to further analysis"; the analysis belongs to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, the corridor's sponsor in the federal program.
The Sussex County Board of County Commissioners had passed a resolution of its own backing the restoration four years earlier, on September 14, 2022, addressed to many of the same offices in Trenton, Harrisburg and Washington. No public response from any agency named in either resolution appears in press releases or posted board records as of September 6, 2026.
What the commissioners are asking Trenton to finish is 7.3 miles of railroad, a quarter-century in the making, now estimated to total about $94 million, with a completion date that has moved before and now sits five years out.
The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad completed the whole line, from Port Morris Junction to Slateford Junction, Pennsylvania, in 1911: 28.5 miles and 73 structures in three and a half years, at a cost of $11 million, about $371 million in today's money. Perhaps 100 men, mostly Italian immigrant workers, were killed or injured in the building of it, the New York Times reported in April 1910, when five died in an accidental explosion near Netcong. Five more died a year earlier when a loading car toppled from a high trestle. In total, as many as 30 workers died to build the line.
It last ran regular passenger trains in 1970. Conrail gave up the route in 1979, and salvage crews pulled the rails five years later. New Jersey condemned what remained in 2001, paying $21 million for 28 miles of roadbed between Port Morris and the Delaware River, according to county planning records.
The North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority approved $36.6 million for the first phase in 2008. Crews laid 4.25 miles of track from Port Morris to Lake Lackawanna in 2011 and 2012, then stopped. A 2016 county planning document predicted commuter trains by late 2018. Instead, pushing the line toward Andover meant replacing a drainage culvert that state environmental permits required, and which stood on private land tied up in a dispute. Andover Township paid $115,000 in 2018 to settle the dispute, five figures of municipal money toward a project then priced at $61.6 million.
The culvert was still awaiting replacement in 2022 when New Jersey Transit awarded a $32.5 million contract to reline the Roseville Tunnel, the Lackawanna-era bore the new track must pass through to reach Andover. The agency announced the work in an April 2022 release that promised passenger service by "late 2026," a target the New Jersey Herald was still reporting as expected in May of last year. Contractors completed the relining last year. No track has been laid through the tunnel.
What remains, a station at Andover and a quarter-mile of connecting track, has not gone out to bid. Assemblyman Michael Inganamort (R, 24th District), whose district covers the corridor, asked for the project's status at a budget hearing this May. The written answer came May 26 from Kris Kolluri, New Jersey Transit's president and CEO: "Design, and then the bidding process for a construction contractor will take about two years." Construction, Kolluri wrote, "is expected to take until 2031." The letter put the project's total cost at about $94 million, $58.8 million of it federal and $35.3 million state. The April 2022 release announcing "late 2026" service remained posted, unrevised, on the agency's website as of September 6.
New Jersey Transit long lacked a dedicated state funding source and routinely moved money meant for construction work to cover day-to-day operating costs, a 2023 New Jersey Policy Perspective analysis found. The agency's public FY2027 budget documents, adopted in July, list no Lackawanna Cutoff line item as of September 6.
U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer, a named recipient of the 2022 resolution, pressed New Jersey Transit to fix the culvert in March 2022, and wrote to Amtrak's chief executive about the line in January 2024. As a congresswoman, Mikie Sherrill co-founded the Lackawanna Cut-Off Rail Restoration Caucus in July 2021, and Sussex County sent her its resolution the next year. Her First 100 Days infrastructure package as governor, released April 30, 2026, names the Gateway tunnels and the Newark Bay Bridge, but not the Cutoff. She has made no public statement on the project as of September 6.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, which leads the corridor's federal planning, has ruled out a 2028 start for the full Scranton-to-New York service: "With the current approach to use the FRA's Corridor ID program as a pathway to future federal funding, 2028 is not feasible," the department wrote in an April 7 public Q&A. It has developed no cost estimate and no timeline. Asked whether the two governors are in step, it answered only that it "can't speak for the respective Governors' offices."
Sussex County commuters, meanwhile, average 36.3 minutes to work, among the longest trips in New Jersey, according to the Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey. Interstate 80, the region's primary east-west corridor, clips less than a mile of the county at its southern tip in Byram Township. A mobility study the county commissioned in 2005 called the Cut-Off a meaningful alternative for the I-80 corridor and projected about 150 boardings a day at an Andover station, while cautioning that the county "may have little input into service levels at each station" — the county could plan the station parking but not the trains.
The New Jersey Transit Board of Directors meets September 16. The Warren County resolution asks the agency, among others, to act. Whether the board will take it up is an open question; it had posted no agenda as of September 6.
New Jersey Transit's current plans end at Andover. West of there, 20 more miles of state-held roadbed run through the woods to Slateford Junction at the Delaware River — empty of rails and ties and, as the New Jersey Herald described the segment in May 2025, "without financing or any kind of project timetable." In the same report, the agency's spokesman said the Andover station would be the "end of the line" for the near future.
Near the western end of that empty stretch, the Paulinskill Viaduct carries the old roadbed 115 feet over the Paulinskill River in Knowlton Township, seven concrete arches and 1,100 feet end to end, the largest reinforced concrete structure in the world when the Lackawanna finished it. Its towers are hollow and guardrails are missing from stretches of its rail bed; spray paint covers the arches. Graffiti writers and urban explorers have made the viaduct a regular destination; a state police trooper told one visitor that officers were arresting 15 to 20 trespassers there each month. A 2019 engineering assessment put rehabilitation at roughly $16 million.
Closer to the end of the line, the old roadbed climbs onto the Pequest Fill: about 110 feet high, three miles long and 6,625,000 cubic yards of earth and rock, the largest railroad embankment ever built at the time and still one of the largest man-made embankments in the world. Some of the men who died building the line are buried beside it, in a small cemetery in Green Township; nobody knows their names, in part because the contractors recorded them only by number, and in part because the wooden markers on their graves have been lost or worn away. The Fill was the Lackawanna's pride at the time, but the restored railroad, if finished, will stop just shy of it. For now, and for the foreseeable future, it sits with the Paulinskill Viaduct in the woods of northwestern New Jersey, waiting for trains that may never return.
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Sources
• Kris Kolluri, letter to Assemblyman Michael Inganamort, New Jersey Transit (May 26, 2026)
• New Jersey Department of Transportation, Interstate 80 traffic regulation order, Sussex County mileposts (September 6, 2026)
• New Jersey Transit, "NJ TRANSIT Advances Lackawanna Cutoff Project," press release (April 13, 2022)
• New Jersey Transit Board, FY2027 budget adoption (July 16, 2026)
• Office of the Governor, First 100 Days infrastructure priorities (April 30, 2026)
• Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, Scranton-to-New York Penn Station corridor Q&A (April 7, 2026)
• Sussex County Board of County Commissioners, resolution (September 14, 2022)
• Sussex County Division of Planning, Lackawanna Cut-Off planning sheet (July 15, 2016)
• Sussex County Division of Planning, Ten-Year Mobility Study, Urbitran Associates (July 2005)
• U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, county mean travel-time estimates (September 6, 2026)
• Warren County Board of County Commissioners, resolution (August 12, 2026)
• New Jersey Herald, "Andover NJ Amtrak stop center of congressman's letter" (January 26, 2024)
• New Jersey Herald, "NJ Transit work to bring rail service to Andover progressing" (May 28, 2025)
• The New York Times, "Premature Blast Kills 5, Hurts 4" (April 15, 1910)
• Pocono Record, "Amtrak to assess Scranton-NYC infrastructure; Cartwright forms rail restoration caucus" (July 21, 2021)
• Josh Gottheimer, "Gottheimer Fights to Push Lackawanna Cut-off Railway Forward," congressional release (March 21, 2022)
• Friends of the Lackawanna Cutoff, "Planning and Construction 1905-1911" (2022)
• Greenman-Pedersen, "Lackawanna Cut-Off Restoration – Commuter Rail Study," for PNRRA and Lackawanna County (December 2019)
• New Jersey Policy Perspective, "Getting Back on Track: Fully Fund NJ Transit by Taxing Big Corporations" (October 2023)
• NJ Skylands, "Tour Lackawanna Cutoff" (n.d.)
• Weird NJ, "Paulinskill Viaduct" (2023)